


The word is help.

by spqr



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Co-Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, ManDadlorian, Mild Daddy Kink, Post-Chapter 16, Protective Din Djarin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:29:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28517928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: In a flash, Fett has his blaster out and pointed at Luke’s head.“You’re right,” he says. “Turnabout’s fair play. So maybe I oughta shoot you.”Din’s voice comes from somewhere behind them. “Try it, Fett.”
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 122
Kudos: 2683





	The word is help.

**Author's Note:**

> yes this is a vessel for mild daddy kink. be ye warned

Luke bumps up against consciousness a few times before he manages to grab on.

He doesn’t know where he is; doesn’t recognize the low ceiling above him or the loose rumbling of the ship’s engine around him. Someone lays a hand on his forehead — warm, leather glove, holding him down more than soothing him — and says, in a voice that strikes a vague chord of recognition somewhere deep in his mind, “Go back to sleep, Jedi.”

He does.

***

The next time he wakes he’s slightly more aware of his surroundings. Fold-out med bed in the back of a junk trawler that’s not in much better shape than the _Falcon,_ mostly naked with fresh, pungent bacta smeared over ninety percent of his body. Everything hurts — his ribs, his shredded shoulder, the soles of his feet. He can hear someone moving around overhead, probably in the ship’s cockpit, and he has a moment to think that he should probably get up and go see who it is, try to figure out how he ended up here, but the med bed’s comfortable and keeping his eyes open is a lot of work and he can’t remember the last time he had a full night’s rest, or even a half night’s rest, and he figures if whoever has him were going to kill him they would’ve done it by now, so he lets his eyelids slip shut under the weight of exhaustion and goes back to sleep.

***

The third time he wakes — his existence fleeting, shallow, pained — the lights are off and he can hear someone else breathing in the hold with him, asleep. He floats just below the surface of true consciousness, too clouded by the pain of his wounds to think clearly, for what feels like an eternity. Before he slips away again, forced into white unconsciousness, he manages to maneuver himself into a healing trance; it’s fitful and weak, and probably helps less than the bacta.

***

“Jedi,” the half-remembered voice says again, somewhere in the dark. “ _Luke_.”

Luke is stronger now; he extracts himself from the trance like a fly picking itself off of a spider’s web, one filigree wing, one twiglike foot, sticky silk clinging. His eyes open to slits, giving him a blurred view of the world through his lashes.

There’s a man bending over his bed, a Mandalorian. Now that Luke’s mind is clearer than it’s been in days, he recognizes him instantly by his armor — he’s the Mandalorian that Grogu thinks of as _Buir_ , who Luke met on Moff Gideon’s Imperial cruiser. That’s at least one question answered, though Luke still has a lot more.

“What — ” he tries to ask, intending to finish _happened?_ , but the word comes out as an unintelligible rasp. His throat is dry, he realizes. Very, very dry.

“I’m out of intravenous fluids,” the Mandalorian tells him. “Sorry — you’re going to have to drink.”

He holds the back of Luke’s head and helps him sit up enough to gulp down some water, which Luke chokes on and coughs up all over his bare chest. The Mandalorian doesn’t comment, just grabs a sterile white rag from a bin above the med bed and mops him up. Luke has enough experience being an invalid that it doesn’t bother him too much, but it _is_ strange to have a living, breathing caretaker, instead of a med droid. The Mandalorian runs the rag over Luke’s spit-dribbled chin before getting up to toss it in a bag full of pink- and red-stained linens, and a stray feverish thought shoots across Luke’s brain like a comet: no one has touched him like that — focused, careful, deliberate — in a long time.

“You should try to get some more sleep,” the Mandalorian says, halfway up the ladder to the cockpit. “We’ll be there in a few hours.”

 _Where?_ Luke wants to ask, but before he can, unconsciousness takes him again.

***

 _Question the Force,_ Yoda once told him _, a Jedi does not. Question the path before them, a Jedi does not. Covet, a Jedi does not._

Luke knows why the old Order had to start the indoctrination early — simple as they may seem, these three edicts are as hard for him to digest at twenty-eight as they were at nineteen. Because no matter how much Luke trusts in the Force, no matter how over-eagerly, bull-headedly accepting he is of the great generational responsibility which has been thrust upon him, most days he can’t help but covet: sleep, rest, guidance, his friends, his family, more hours in a day, Aunt Beru’s cooking, Chewie’s crushing hug, Han’s laugh and Leia’s serene, knowing smile, someone to talk to who’s more than twelve years old, someone to hear his doubts and insecurities who isn’t a glowing blue Jedi master, someone to laugh with in the raw, quiet hours of the night, someone to share his bed, his joys, his sorrows, his life.

 _Covet, a Jedi does not_ , Luke reminds himself, when one of his younglings wakes him in the middle of the night to clean up sheets covered in spew. _Covet, a Jedi does not_ , pacing the hangar level of the Praxeum and remembering how this place used to bustle and teem with life, pilots in orange jumpsuits and astromechs on mag-lifts and pit crews prepping X-wings for liftoff — now, so empty with his one lonely ship that his footsteps echo. _Covet, a Jedi does not,_ with a manic, desperate edge, splashing water on his face after a particularly disturbing dream involving C-3PO and the feeling of metal on his bare skin.

That one, he doesn’t have any particular trouble letting go of, but the rest creep into his psyche and stay, staining him with dark, dangerous yearning, until the way he reminds himself to let go, releasing his emotions into the Force, makes him feel like a puppet on strings, a one-man exercise in call and response.

 _Covet, a Jedi does not_.

Except a Jedi really, really does.

***

The next time he wakes, he’s in his bed at the Praxeum, and Grogu is sitting on his chest.

It’s far from the first time Luke’s woken up like this in the months since the child has come to the temple, so he just smiles softly at him and thumbs the corner of his ear. “Hey there, little one.”

 _Aboo,_ Grogu says, his hands on Luke’s face.

From the start, he’s been very tactile — all of Luke’s kids turned out to be that way, once they realized that he doesn’t mind, that he’s not going to reprimand them for it. He knows that’s not how younglings were raised in the temple on Coruscant, that it’s not the old Jedi way, but he decided long before he took his first apprentice that he would be making a few non-negotiable edits to the Code. After all, he can imagine few things more cruel than depriving a child of love.

In keeping with their usual morning routine, Luke moves Grogu off onto bed beside him, and Grogu takes that as an invitation to curl up like a tookacat in the crook of Luke’s shoulder. Luke usually prods at him gently with the Force and makes him get up for the day — no matter how cute he is or how small he is or how sometimes Luke feels a tug in his chest like Grogu’s his own child, it doesn’t excuse him from morning meditation — but today he’s feeling cautious about how nothing hurts, so he just yawns and lets both of them drift back to sleep.

***

A few minutes later, he’s awakened by Dorsk shouting, “Cool, a flamethrower!”

He figures that’s probably not a great sign, and that he ought to get out of bed. When he finally manages it, he shuffles into the kitchen on bare feet, his robe hanging from his shoulders and Grogu tucked in one arm, to find all his kids crowded around the Mandalorian, who seems to be cooking breakfast with an arm-mounted flamethrower.

 _Buir,_ Grogu thinks, over their training bond.

“There’s a stove,” Luke’s mouth says, before his brain catches up with what he’s seeing.

The Mandalorian looks at him — well, the helmet tilts his direction, and Luke assumes. “They broke it,” he says.

“They broke it,” Luke echoes.

He turns his gaze on his apprentices, but they’ve clearly had enough time to lock down the weak link, because Streen breaks into a flop sweat almost immediately but doesn’t say anything. Kyp is sitting on the counter doing his whole ‘too cool for this’ act, Dorsk is still watching the Mandalorian’s flamethrower with a look of intense concentration, and Tionne, the picture of innocence, says, “Artoo’s fixing it.”

Luke looks pointedly at the stove, which Artoo is clearly not fixing.

“After he fixes your X-wing,” Tionne amends.

Luke frowns, setting Grogu down in his high chair at the table when he seems likely to make a dive for his breakfast. “What happened to my X-wing?”

There’s a moment of silence, like no one can believe he just asked that. He at least expects an answer from Tionne — she’s the responsible one, the oldest — but even she doesn’t seem sure how to answer. Luke suddenly feels the same way he’d felt waking up in the medbay after his near-death on Hoth; not sure what he’d missed but knowing he missed _something_.

It’s the Mandalorian who asks, “You don’t remember?”

Luke shakes his head. “No. I really don’t.”

***

The Mandalorian explains as he and Luke go downstairs to take a look at his ruined X-wing in the hangar. He’s not much of a talker, but Luke gets the gist: the Force signature he responded to on Dantooine wasn’t a real child at all, but a trap set up by an Imperial remnant. The second he entered the atmosphere, they shot him out of the sky. Luke was knocked unconscious by crush wounds and G-force, but Artoo managed pilot his broken ship down into a dense forest, where it was hidden well enough that, even after days of searching, the Imperials (‘Imps,’ the Mandalorian calls them) had no hope of finding him. When his padawans felt the disturbance through their training bonds, they tried the emergency codes which Luke had left for them — first Leia, then Chewie — but had gotten no response. Then they found the Mandalorian’s personal code written on a tag inside Grogu’s tiny robes and figured that would be as good a shot as any.

“And you came?” Luke asks, incredulous.

The Mandalorian looks at him flatly. “Try not to sound so surprised.”

“No, sorry. It’s just — I’m not used to…” Luke shakes his head, mystified by his own reaction. “It’s been a while since anyone showed up to rescue me, that’s all.”

The Mandalorian keeps looking at him for another long moment, inscrutable behind that helmet, and Luke wishes he were better at sensing people’s feelings, because it’s hard to read someone’s face when you can’t see it.

At last, he can’t take the quiet anymore, so he adds, “What I should’ve said is thank you.”

The Mandalorian looks away. If Luke didn’t know any better — which he doesn’t, so maybe he’s right — he’d guess the man was uncomfortable. “No thanks necessary,” he says, voice tight. “I got to see the kid, so.”

“Oh,” Luke says, “you don’t have to rescue me as an excuse. You can see him whenever you want.”

From the Mandalorian’s silence, he infers, “I forgot to mention that, didn’t I?”

The continued silence, he interprets as ‘yes.’

“Sorry,” he says, “it’s just, with the other kids, most of their parents said they wouldn’t want to visit even if they could, and that was — it turned out hurting them more than not offering at all, so I guess I just…Skipped that part.”

Although, remembering his brief glimpse of the Mandalorian’s face, his reverent expression and the sudden stab of agonized loss that Luke had felt from him as he handed the child over, he probably should’ve _led_ with visitation rights. Now, standing under his broken X-wing, he feels like an idiot. He’s still shirtless under his robe and mostly barefoot, and he knows he has a mad case of bedhead, too, so he probably also _looks_ like an idiot.

“You can stay as long as you want,” he says, like that will make up for his blunder. “As long as you don’t interfere with training. There are plenty of empty rooms.”

After a long, tense beat, the Mandalorian nods, and walks out.

***

“Sorry,” Leia says, when Luke finally manages to raise her on comms. “We were hiding on an asteroid in hostile territory, you know how it is.”

Luke squints. It’s dark in his room and the holo is very bright. “Hostile territory?” he asks.

“Hostile to Han, not the Republic,” Leia clarifies.

“That’s most of space.”

She snorts. “Don’t I know it. Marrying him is going to be a diplomatic nightmare.”

 _“Marrying him?_ ”

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not a romantic consideration, Luke. If I don’t marry someone soon, the Chancellor is going to use me as a bargaining chip in some sort of archaic political alliance.”

“If it’s not a romantic consideration, why pick Han?”

“I figure the father of my child is as good a choice as any.”

Luke rubs his face with both hands. It’s a two-handed headache. “I didn’t think the Senate arranged marriages.”

“The Senate’s trying to hold the New Republic together with duct tape and chewing gum. Anything goes, as long as it brings about some semblance of order.” Now that he’s rubbed his face vigorously, he realizes she sounds tired — looks it, too, with her hair loose and circles under her eyes. “If I bow out, Amilyn’s going to take the brunt of the pressure. Hell, maybe I should go through with it.”

“Go through with it?” Luke asks. “Marrying someone you don’t love? For what?”

“My duty to the Republic, that’s what,” Leia snaps, then looks immediately remorseful. “These are the hard days,” she says, softer. “We’re all having to make sacrifices. That’s what you do when you’re trying to build something that matters, that lasts.”

Luke’s eyes suddenly feel hot and prickly with tears. He rubs both hands over his face again, to cover it up, but Leia’s too smart, too good at reading him. “ _Luke,”_ she says, softly. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” he says, and then in contradiction, “It’s okay. You’re right. You’re always right.”

She shakes her head sadly, but doesn’t argue. “Are your students okay?” she asks, changing the subject. “The comm from the temple — ”

“It’s fine,” Luke says. “We’re all fine. I was late getting back, that’s all.”

Leia doesn’t look like she quite believes him, but she only says, “Okay. It’s late here. Talk soon?”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Talk soon.”

They hang up.

***

Most of the time when Luke wakes up with Grogu asleep on his chest, it’s because the child had a nightmare and levitated into his room; less often, it’s because Luke had a nightmare and the child toddled in to comfort him.

None of the other younglings are so sensitive to Luke’s presence in the Force, even with their training bonds, and Luke figures it’s because of all the training Grogu had before the fall of the Order. In a lot of ways, the child is even more experienced than he is in the ways of the Jedi, and there’s something about having the small, warm weight of him curled up on his chest that calms Luke even in sleep. He has no idea if it’s a Jedi trick, like how the child heals scraped knees and stubbed toes, blinking up at his fellow padawans with giant, sparkling eyes and a soft _boo_ , or if it’s as simple as having company in his weakest and most vulnerable moments, coming out of the thick nauseating roil of a dream to find that he’s not alone. Either way, he’s grateful. Hugely, stupidly grateful.

***

Artoo declines to fix the stove, citing that it’s gross under there and that Tionne didn’t ask him before she told Luke he would fix it, which is how Luke ends up on his back with his head dangerously close to the grease trap, trying to remember what Uncle Owen said when their stove broke back on Tatooine. Luke was ten at the time, so the memory’s hazy, but it’s not like he can call a repairman.

He’s straining to reach a tool that’s rolled out onto the kitchen floor when he sees the Mandalorian’s boots walk into the room. He senses Grogu’s presence with him — a bright, happy lilt — and, mindlessly following the chain of the child’s thoughts, says, “ _Buir_.”

The boots halt. The Mandalorian crouches, cape pooling on the floor behind him, and tilts his helmet so he can see Luke under the stove. “Din,” he corrects. “Din Djarin.”

“Din,” Luke amends, blushing furiously. He figures it’s no use trying to go back to undo his earlier slip — directly adressing it can only make things worse — so he forges on. “Can you hand me that spanner?”

The Mandalorian — _Din,_ Luke reminds himself _—_ can, and he does.

***

Some mornings, Luke rises with the sun; others, he’s already awake, late nights tending the archives turning into bleary-eyed slurping down caf in the empty kitchen; in both cases, he often climbs the ziggaraut to watch the sun rise over the jungles of Yavin IV.

The rays breaking over the horizon bring him a quiet sort of peace, the same peace he used to find watching the suns set on Tatooine. Sometimes there’s an itch in his spine that makes him stand up and move through katas, an almost restlike meditation in the burn of his muscles; sometimes he simply sits with his caf and feels the balmy wind in his hair and thinks about all the Jedi who sat here before him and all the Jedi who will sit here after him, a simultaneously lonely and companionable ache in his chest.

This morning, he’s not alone. He senses Din before he sees him, a calm, steadfast presence in the Force. He falters when he climbs the last step and sees Luke sitting on the edge, but when Luke turns to him with a friendly smile and says, “Come on, sit down,” he does.

Shoulder to shoulder, only a foot of space between them, Luke suddenly remembers the comforting sense of him in the dark cargo hold of the ship, the warm sound of his breathing. “Do you sleep with that on?” he asks.

Din gives him a look that Luke thinks would be a startled blink if he weren’t wearing a helmet. “No,” he says. “Not if I don’t have to.”

Luke hums. “Not too comfortable?”

Din huffs something that might almost be a laugh. “Not too comfortable,” he agrees.

They lapse into comfortable silence for a few minutes, watching the sun creep ever-higher in the sky, before Luke thinks of something else. “Hey,” he says. “Do you want to spar?”

Din considers for a moment, then shrugs. “Sure.”

***

It’s been a long time since Luke’s had occasion to make a new friend, so his overtures of comradeship and fealty are sort of clumsy, but he figures Din’s history of nursing Luke back to health and wiping spit off his chin uniquely qualify him to not give a kriff, so his awkwardness falls away quickly. It helps that they spend most of their quality time in the early mornings, tumbling and dancing together on the dusty mats in the sparring room, Luke sweating in his gray workout kit, Din battened down in full armor, trading hits with a couple of practice staffs that Luke dug out of storage. Luke’s never sparred with someone like this, someone who can meet him blow for blow, and it’s _good_ , so good that he finds himself laughing as he uses the Force to leap around the room, as he ducks Din’s staff and sweeps at him with his own, so good that after, when they both collapse on the mat, Luke flat on his back, Din buckled onto his hands and knees, Luke wants to reach out and touch him.

***

So good that, lying in bed at night, Luke can’t help but want to touch him some more, remembering the easy familiarity of their bodies, how they moved together in concert, the sharp barking wood of their staffs and how it felt when Din laid a gloved hand on his forehead in the close womblike cradle of the med bed, murmuring _Go back to sleep, Jedi_ , how he says _Luke_ in the early mornings, low, short, matter-of-fact, and Luke knows it’s just his name but he’s always had an overactive imagination, so it’s easy to imbue it with all sorts of meaning. And Luke can’t bite Din’s palm, he can’t buck his hips up into Din’s grip, so he bites his own palm and bucks up into his own grip and reminds himself, sticky and frustrated in the aftermath, _Covet, a Jedi does not._

***

“I meant to ask,” Din says, some weeks into his stay. “The scars on your chest.”

“Go ahead and ask, then,” Luke teases. He’s pouring tea for the whole clan — Kyp’s the only one who shares Luke’s addiction to caf. “Or was that a question?”

Din, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, just looks at him, not rising to the bait. He’s getting to know Luke too well to fall for it when Luke uses humor to deflect.

Luke sighs. “It was a Sith,” he says.

Din still doesn’t say anything. Luke, as usual, feels the need to fill the silence. “Force lightning,” he explains. “A darksider ability, one that I pray died with him.”

“You killed him?” Din asks.

“No,” Luke says. “My father did.”

Din makes a short sound. “I didn’t know Jedi had fathers.”

“Did they not teach biology on Mandalore?”

“I didn’t grow up on Mandalore,” Din says, and then, “You know what I mean.”

Luke nods as he finishes pouring the last cup of tea. “That was the old way,” he explains. “Children were taken from their parents and raised in the Order, forbidden from developing personal attachments. The masters worried that divided allegiance would diminish a Jedi’s commitment to the Order, and thought it was easier to let go if the younglings never knew their parents.”

“Are you worried about it?” Din asks, something reserved and almost dangerous in his tone. “Divided allegiance?”

Luke shakes his head. “No. We’re not at war. I’m not training soldiers. You don’t have to be mindlessly obedient to uphold the ideals of decency and goodness.”

He puts the tea cups on a tray. “Besides, you can’t expect any being to survive without love. That would be cruel.”

“You love them?” Din asks. “Your students?”

Luke falters, caught off guard. He can already hear the talking-to he’s going to get from Yoda and Ben later, but on this one thing he’ll never bend to them, so he answers honestly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

***

It’s rare that his father appears to him, but when he does he comes to Luke at night, in the private, insulated hours before the dawn, when the landscape is dark and the peaceful, sleeping signatures of Luke’s students float like fireflies at the edge of his awareness. They sit close together in the empty meditation room, Anakin’s glowing blue knees nearly touching Luke’s — if they could even touch — and Anakin tells him stories about growing up on Tatooine, about pod racing, about Naboo, about the first time he saw Luke and Leia’s mother, the first time he kissed her, how his palms sweated at their wedding.

Mostly he shies away from offering Luke advice; Luke knows that his father doesn’t think he has any good advice to give, that he’s not worthy to bestow it, with everything he did. But he does give him one piece of wisdom: _Make sure they know they can talk to you. Make sure they know that their problems are your problems, that you’re not going to get mad at them for what they’re feeling. I think…_

 _I think,_ he says, gazing off at the floor with something twisted and regretful in the set of his jaw, _if I could’ve talked to someone about Padme, about the dreams I was having…maybe I wouldn’t have fallen._

***

Luke takes to running to blow off steam — and with Din in the temple, there’s a lot of steam. Sometimes he takes Grogu with him, in a sling on his back like he used to carry Yoda on Dagobah, light-footed over roots and streams as he circles the temple for hours on end. Din’s taken over some of the basic hand-to-hand lessons that Luke was teaching the older ones, but Grogu’s too young, so while his father’s occupied Luke takes him and does flips over tall trees and handstands with Grogu balanced on his feet, feeling the clear, happy burble of the child’s delight in the Force while he peers down at Luke and says, _Aboo._

“Hi,” Luke says back, smiling upside-down. “How’s the weather up there?”

***

Grogu might not like being carried, but he certainly delights in being tall, which is why Luke sometimes lets him sit on his shoulder while he cooks dinner.

It’s sizzling noodles tonight, like Aunt Beru used to make it, with a side of eggs for anyone who’s too coward to handle the amount of spice Luke likes. Grogu tips over ambitiously toward a raw egg, and Luke steadies him with the Force, laughing. “Patience is a virtue, padawan.”

“He’d do anything for an egg,” Din says, coming up behind him.

Luke smiles fondly. “I’ve noticed.”

Din runs a gloved finger over the shell of Grogu’s ear, and when the child reaches for him he picks him up off Luke’s shoulder and tucks him against his chest. Grogu puts his hands on Din’s helmet and coos up at him, and something heavy passes between father and son that Luke’s helpless to interpret. It feels like something he shouldn’t be watching, anyway, as much as he wants to, so he turns his attention back to his noodles.

After a minute of quiet, the sauce sizzling on the stove, Din says, “You can talk to him, can’t you? You can hear his thoughts?”

Startled, Luke nods.

Din holds his finger out for Grogu to curl his hand around, and Luke feels a stab of something from him in the Force — sadness? longing? “Can you teach me?” he asks.

With a lurch, Luke realizes that Din has never spoken to his child, that he may in fact die of old age before he ever gets the chance. And he wishes then, standing stupidly with a wooden spoon in his hand, that he could give Din some of his power, that he could let him have this — but he can’t.

Din must read the answer on his face, because his shoulders tighten, and he nods.

“I’m sorry,” Luke says uselessly.

Din only nods again.

***

Luke spends the next several nights in the archives, poring over the scant tomes he’s managed to acquire. Most have come via Lando from black market dealers, some have come through more official channels and Leia’s tri-monthly supply delivery, but all of them have one thing in common — Luke lacks most of the context to sufficiently understand what they say. Nevertheless, in consultation with Ben’s ghost, he works his way through a dense text about Force bonds and communication, and after dinner one night, while Dorsk and Streen are yelling at each other over the dishes, he pulls Din aside and says, “Bring Grogu.”

He can sense Din’s uncertainty as he follows Luke into the meditation room, and the hesitance stays as he folds down to sit cross-legged on the mat with Luke, Grogu in his lap. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Luke says. “I think I found a way to help you talk to him.”

Din goes very, very still.

“I’d be acting as a conduit,” Luke babbles in the quiet, inexplicably nervous all of a sudden — like Din will be mad at him for his presumptuousness, like he won’t like his gift. “So I’d hear everything, but — ”

“Yes,” Din says.

Luke feels a rush of giddy relief. “Okay,” he says. “I need to touch your skin — it can be your hand, if you can take off your glove — ” and before he’s even finished speaking, Din’s glove is off, his bare hand resting palm-up on his knee, meditation style. Luke wonders wildly if Mandalorians meditate, or if Din’s been watching him, looking in on the morning meditation. It doesn’t matter — he scoots forward, close enough that he can take Din’s hand in one of his and rest the other on Grogu’s soft head.

 _Aboo,_ the child comments, reaching up to grab Luke’s pinky finger.

“Now, be quiet, and open your mind,” Luke says. “If you sense my presence, don’t fight me.”

Din’s grip on his fingers tightens. Luke’s stomach swoops, and it has nothing to do with the tricky Force work he’s doing and everything to do with the warmth of Din’s palm against his.

He gathers himself and reaches for his training bond with Grogu, at the same time reaching for the Force-null cloud of Din’s thoughts, like the book instructed him. Luke doesn’t have the background in mind healing that the text expected him to, but he’s quite sure that he’s dedicated more thought to the matter in the last few days than any Jedi in a millennium, so after a few shaky tries, he manages to hook the connection, like fitting a wrench around the right bolt by touch alone.

It’s Din who tells him he has it right, sucking in a sharp, watery breath.

 _Buir,_ the child thinks along the bond, and Din laughs.

***

Later — after long, happy hours cross-legged on the meditation mat, after Grogu has relayed an entire lifetime in sights and sounds and snacks, after he’s started to tilt over in his father’s lap and tiredness has crept over the training bond, after Luke gently breaks the connection and drifts behind them, suddenly bereft, as Din carries the child to bed, after he lingers in the hallway, unsure of his welcome, and finally tears himself away to head back to his own bed for the first time in a week — Din closes the child’s door softly behind him and says, “Luke.”

There’s something in his voice that’s tight, almost urgent, and Luke stops in his tracks. Din comes down the dark hall, past the closed doors of the other students’ rooms, puts a hand on the back of Luke’s skull, and leans his helmet against his forehead.

“Thank you,” he says. “ _Thank you._ ”

Some vital part of Luke’s anatomy has gone soft and jelly-fied at the feeling of Din’s gloved fingers in his hair, but he manages to choke out, “No thanks necessary.”

***

The cave swallows him out of a dream about the smoky swamps of Dagobah, and Luke feels his body twist like a knotted wire even though he’s asleep. He knows that he’s asleep, but he can’t wake — he can never wake when he dreams of the cave, like the hanging roots and the cloying _wrongness_ of the place have taken hold of his unconscious soul. He never sees the same thing twice, like the cave evolves along with his fears, and tonight it’s Grogu’s cries that he hears, Din’s voice yelling for him in the dark.

He wakes with a start to the feeling of the child settling on his chest, and catches himself before he can dislodge him. His heart is beating a million miles an hour, lungs heaving, terrified sweat drying on his forehead and the back of his neck, and he clings to Grogu’s simple, calming presence in the Force with a desperation that he never has before. Din’s screams echo in his head, and suddenly, cradling Grogu with shaking hands, he wishes that he could cling to him, too — could run his hands over him and reassure himself that he was okay, that he was whole, that they were all together. The desire is so strong that Luke has to shut his eyes against it.

_Covet, a Jedi does not._

Grogu coos sleepily, tiny hand on Luke’s chin. Luke presses a kiss to his peach-fuzzy head. “It’s okay,” he tells him. “Go back to sleep, little guy.”

Grogu does.

***

It’s afternoon, and Luke’s leading his padawans through an elementary second form kata — Streen wobbling precariously on one foot, Tionne textbook-perfect, Grogu lying flat on his back and cooing at a butterfly — when he hears the whine of a ship’s engine overhead.

He frowns as he watches it sink out of atmo, hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun. He recognizes that ship, and the fact that it’s here on Yavin can’t mean anything good.

“Tionne,” he says, “take everyone to the panic room. Kyp, find Din.”

As his kids scatter, he walks down the outside of the ziggaraut to meet the _Slave I_ as it lands. He doesn’t take his lightsaber out — he’s learned over the years that starting from a place of violence is never a good way to get to peace — but he keeps his hand on the hilt as the ramp unfolds.

He’s not taking any chances. Not with the younglings.

Boba Fett clunks down the ramp in full armor with his hand on his blaster, so apparently Luke made a good call. They stand face to face, mere feet apart, for a tense, silent minute.

“Skywalker,” says Fett, at last. “Last time I saw you, I was left for dead in a sarlacc pit.”

“Turnabout is fair play,” Luke says. “Let’s not pretend you weren’t about to shoot me in the head.”

In a flash, Fett has his blaster out and pointed at Luke’s head.

Luke’s lightsaber hums in his hand.

“You’re right,” Fett says. “Turnabout’s fair play. So maybe I oughta shoot you now.”

Din’s voice comes from somewhere behind them. “Try it, Fett.”

Luke doesn’t turn his head, but he determines from the minute motion of Fett’s helmet where Din must be standing. “Djarin,” says the other Mandalorian. “Just the man I was looking for.”

“You don’t put that blaster down, I’ll be the last man you ever see.”

“Touchy,” Fett comments, but all the same he lowers the blaster, puts it away. “You ought to notify us when you adopt new clan members, Djarin. It’s dangerous, letting your friends fumble around in the dark.”

Luke extinguishes his lightsaber and clips it back on his belt, turning just in time to see Din put his own blaster away. “What do you want, Fett?” Din asks.

“And how’d you find this place?” Luke demands, once his brain stops fixating on _clan_.

“All questions best answered over a nice cup of caf,” Fett says. “Are you going to invite me in?”

“ _No,”_ Din says, before Luke can.

Fett holds up his hands in surrender and turns back up the ramp. “I guess I better invite _you_ in, then. _Just_ you, Djarin — leave the Jedi out here.”

Luke catches Din’s arm on his way past. “Hey.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but Din holds his gaze — visor to eyes — for a long beat, and Luke knows he understands. “I’ll handle it,” he promises, and sweeps up the ramp after his kinsman.

***

Less than an hour later, _Slave I_ heads back out of atmo. Luke stands in the opening to the underground hangar bay and watches Din come back towards him across the disturbed dirt of the courtyard, cape whipping in the breeze kicked up by the ship’s liftoff. There’s something tense and charged in how he walks, like he’s carrying energy he hasn’t been able to release yet, and instead of slowing down as he reaches Luke, he steps right into his space, lifts him off his feet, and crowds him into the afternoon shadows, pressing him up against a pillar. Luke grabs onto his shoulders, taking fistfuls of his cape, and holds on hard, like it will help him get a handle on how every nerve ending in his body has come alive at once.

Din’s helmet presses into the side of his face, cool against Luke’s skin. “You scared me,” he says. His fingers dig into Luke’s side, next to his spine. “ _Kriff,_ you scared me.”

Luke remembers the feverish need he’d felt when he woke up from his dream the other night, to hold Din and feel that he was okay, and realizes with a slap of recognition that it must be mutual. “I’m okay,” he assures him, sliding one hand up to hold his helmet, wishing he could hold his head. “I’m okay. I’ve survived Boba Fett before.”

Din lets out a long, shaky breath into the crook of Luke’s neck, and one of his trembling hands — still gloved — slides beneath his shirt to touch bare skin. Luke’s grip on his shoulder and his helmet tightens to something with an edge of desperation, and for the first time he notices just _how much_ of Din is pressed up against him, the hard lines of his beskar armor and the warm leather of his gloves, both hands now, tangled up beneat Luke’s robes.

 _“Din,_ ” he breathes, turning his mouth against his helmet.

Din makes a sound like he’s been kicked, and he tips his helmet under the hinge of Luke’s jaw, like he wants to kiss his neck. Luke slides his leg up the outside of Din’s, wanting to get closer, and hooks it around his waist, so that Din is settled in the cradle of his hips, so that he can grind down against the bulge in his pants.

He chokes on a gasp, high and thready, and Din says, “ _Luke_ , can I — ”

“ _Please_ ,” Luke says, “gods, please — ”

A gloved hand slips under the waistband of his pants, worn leather soft on his cock. Din mutters something in Mando’a that must be a swear, _cyar’ika_ , and Luke clings to him and turns his face into his helmet and tries not to lose himself to how good it feels, which is difficult because he’s _on fire._

Din’s voice, the shape of him under Luke’s hands, how solid he is, his body pressed tight and unmoving against Luke’s and his hand working furiously between them — a pressure builds inside him like nothing he’s ever felt in previous sexual encounters, so that Luke’s helpless to do anything but pant against Din’s helmet, his breath fogging the visor, and move into the deliberate, focused squeeze of his hand. “Din,” he begs, and then, acting on some wild instinct, “ _Buir.”_

There’s a sharp spike of arousal in the Force.

All the air shocks out of Din at once, and with a final, savage tug, he finishes Luke off.

Luke trembles in his arms, totally boneless. One of his legs slips down, and his foot hits the ground. When he comes back to himself, breathing hard, chest pressed against beskar, he reaches between them for Din’s cock and finds a warm, sticky mess.

“Sorry,” Din says, but he doesn’t sound sorry at all. Which is good, because Luke’s not sorry, either.

***

Retrieving his padawans from the panic room, feeding them dinner, and reassuring them that everything is okay so that they calm down enough to go to bed occupies Luke so completely that he forgets to ask what Boba Fett wanted until Din is already putting Grogu to bed, at which point he starts thinking words like _family_ and _home_ and gets slapped across the face by a really serious existential crisis.

An hour later, in the pouring rain, he runs into a circle of ruins deep in the Yavin jungle, and falls to his knees. He’s soaked to the bone, freezing, shivering pitifully in the moonlight, and faintly in some part of his brain that’s still capable of coherent thought, he hopes that his blue-lipped appearance will make the masters more receptive to his pleas. He bows his head.

“Masters,” he says, then, voice breaking, “Father, hear me. Please.”

For a moment, he’s alone with the rain and his raging heart.

Then a soft blue glow suffuses the ruins, and he looks up into his father’s eyes. “Luke,” Anakin says. “You look like you’ve had a rough day, kid.”

Luke laughs, and halfway through it turns into a sob. Tears mingle with rain on his face.

“Troubled, you are,” says Yoda, behind him. “Sense it, I can. Your vows, you wish to betray.”

Anakin scowls over Luke’s shoulder. “He never made any vows,” he snaps.

“In his heart, he made them,” Ben says.

“Oh, _kark_ that — ”

“Masters,” Luke cuts in, before this can get out of hand. “Father. I require your guidance. I would be grateful if you could keep your own squabbles out of it.”

Appropriately chastised, none of the ghosts says another word.

Luke takes a deep breath, gathering his thoughts. It’s difficult; he has a lot of them, and none of them are in any particular order. He thinks of his padawans, who he loves, and Din, who he loves, and what he’s read of the old Order’s teachings, that love was dangerous because it lead to jealousy, possessiveness, fear, rage. He tries to imagine a future in which he is alone, in which he has denied himself Din’s touch and Din’s company in his bed, denied his children his protection and affection, and wonders if it’s possible that in cutting himself off from his family he might love them less, might be driven less to fear if they were ever in danger, less to anger if they were ever hurt. He thinks that he could close himself in a Force-dampening cell for a thousand years and not see another living soul and still feel as fiercely and inextricably attached to them as he does now. He thinks that there is not one single version of Luke Skywalker that doesn’t end up here, in the rain, chest empty because he left his heart in the hands of a Mandalorian.

He turns to his father. Anakin is watching him, expression halfway between pride and sorrow. “My mother,” Luke begins. “Did you fall because you loved her, or because you weren’t allowed to love her?”

Anakin doesn’t answer. He probably knows it’s a rhetorical question.

Luke turns around to look at his first, best-loved master. “Ben. You loved your padawan, didn’t you?”

Ben’s eyes, impossibly old and impossibly sad, find Anakin. “Yes,” he admits, after a beat. “He was my brother.”

“But you didn’t fall,” Luke says. “You never fell, not even when he did. It’s not love that causes a Jedi to fall, is it? It’s denial of it. It’s when you lock it away, let it fester. When it turns into resentment.”

Yoda scoffs disdainfully. “Foolish, this line of questioning is. Clear, the Order’s teachings are.”

Luke stands, rain pounding on his shoulders.

“Dead, the Order is,” he shoots back, and Anakin laughs.

***

As he walks back to the temple in the cleansing downpour, mud up to his thighs, Luke lets himself look directly at his feelings for Din for the first time. It’s like staring into a floodlight, into the sun — he laughs aloud at the swoop of exhiliration in his chest, the sudden freedom of being able to wonder, really wonder, _does he smile under the helmet, does he roll his eyes, does he look at me when I’m not looking at him._ _Does he have all his eggs in one basket, like I have all my eggs in one basket, and is it as new and terrifying for him as it is for me._

***

Luke’s hypothermic and way out of his head by the time he makes it back to the hangar, so it’s a good thing Din meets him by the lift. “Hi,” Luke says, smiling big and dopey.

Din catches him by the shoulders. “Where have you been? You’re freezing.”

“I’m fine,” Luke says. “Really — ”

Then he sort of passes out, and the next thing he’s aware of he’s sitting in the floor in a ’fresher, the shower is steaming up, and Din is wrestling with his muddy pants in a way that feels angry.

“Hi,” Luke says again.

Din stops, crouched by his feet, and looks at him. The heat has fogged up the visor on his helmet, and Luke reaches out to touch him, struck by the sudden urge to leave fingerprints in the condensation. Din catches his hand before he can, folding Luke’s fingers into his. “You need to warm up,” he says, in a tone that leaves no room for argument.

He helps Luke get his pants off, but once he determines that he can stand on his own without falling over, he leaves him to handle the rest on his own.

Luke tries not to feel too disappointed — after all, it must be getting pretty hot under all that armor. He wants to ask Din to stay, ask him to strip down, to trust Luke with his body, but he doesn’t. It’s not the right time.

***

 _None_ of this is the right time, really, Luke thinks, skin turning pink under the scalding heat of the shower. They feel like something that happened by accident, that shouldn’t have happened at all in a pre-ordained universe, and somehow that makes Luke even more sure of it, of them — Din isn’t destiny, he’s not fate, he’s not some prophecy passed down by the all-powerful all-knowing Force, he’s just a man who stumbled into Luke’s life and decided to stay.

***

When he emerges from the shower, Din is waiting in the kitchen with tea. Luke’s never seen him brew tea, and he’s sort of bummed he missed the experience, but he figures he’ll get another chance.

He joins him at the table just as Din stands up. They both falter. Din picks up the tray and says, “I thought maybe somewhere more private.”

Luke swallows, suddenly nervous. “Sure,” he says. “My room?”

Inside, he closes the door. Din sets the tea down on his small table, moving aside Luke’s tablet. Then he sits down and takes his helmet off.

Luke freezes with his hand on the other chair.

Din looks up at him, lips pressed tight together, like he’s awaiting judgement. Luke wants to stare at him — he wants to spend the rest of his life staring at him — but he knows what Din needs right now, and it’s not that, so instead he pulls out the chair and sits down.

Din pours them each a cup. They sip. There’s something almost unspeakably intimate about this, for all its simplicity — sharing a cup of tea. Luke holds hot, fragrant water on his tongue and has visions of waking up in the morning next to this man, falling asleep next to this man, squeezing next to each other in front of the mirror in the ’fresher, learning his morning routine and the pattern of his snores and how the hair grows on his legs, how he looks when he oversleeps and jolts awake, disoriented, harried, embarrassed.

“What did Boba Fett want?” Luke asks, trying to keep the conversation as normal as possible.

Din sets down his cup, licking a shine of tea off his upper lip. “To tell me Bo-Katan was looking for me.”

“Bo-Katan Kryze?” Luke asks, momentarily thrown. “Why’s she looking for you?”

“She wants to be king of Mandalore,” Din says. “So she has to fight me.”

“Why does she have to fight you to be king of Mandalore?”

“Well,” Din says, sort of awkwardly. “Right now, I’m king of Mandalore.”

“Huh,” Luke comments. “That wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

Din smiles — a small, fleeting thing, soft enough to warm Luke to his core. He can’t help but smile back, that big, dopey smile again, which definitely clues Din into the fact that he’s being watched. His smile falls. He clears his throat. “I should say something.”

“You don’t have to,” Luke says, too fast.

“No,” Din says. “I know. I want to.”

After a minute, he continues, “I was raised to believe in a creed. I still believe in it, for the most part. I believe in what it means to be a Mandalorian — in honor, in loyalty, in…family that goes beyond blood. But I know now that there is more than one way. And I might still…I might always hide my face from outsiders. But I don’t have to hide it from the people I love. From my clan.”

Luke’s breath is caught somewhere next to his heart. He gets out of his chair, steps around the table, and stops, not knowing how he’s allowed to proceed. His hand hovers over Din’s shoulder. “Can I…?”

“Yes,” Din says, “ _yes_ ,” and reaches up to grab him as Luke climbs into his lap.

***

As the rains stop and Yavin crawls into a blazing summer, Luke takes the padawans on a scavenging expedition to one of the neighboring ruins, and Tionne finds a device that turns out to be a laser tattoo gun. Luke tries to forbid its use, Tionne claims to be an autonomous adult at the age of fourteen, and by the time _that_ argument is over he realizes that Streen has already stolen it and is tattooing _KICK ME_ in basic on Dorsk’s butt.

Luke sighs, rolls his eyes skyward, and decides that the best way to corral the situation is to declare Tionne in charge of the tattoo gun, and make her promise to only use it on the six month setting. She gets it back from Streen in less than a minute and turns _KICK ME_ into _KICK MEANIES!_ , which Luke guesses he supports in spirit even if he wouldn’t have wished it permanently tattooed on the rear end of one of his padawans.

Tionne covers her own legs in ornate, swirling designs, turns it on the one hour setting and draws doodles on Grogu’s hands and feet that make him coo happily and tilt his head, and refuses to write swear words on Kyp’s forehead while he’s sleeping, which means Streen and Dorsk lose interest pretty fast. She sticks with it though, and she gets good at it, so that at the end of the summer Luke caves and finally allows her to do one on him, like she’s been begging to for months.

“What do you want?” she asks, when he sits down next to her on the ledge of the ziggaraut, and he starts to say, _I don’t know_ , but then he catches himself, thinking.

“Actually,” he says, “can we do this tomorrow? I have to get you a reference.”

While Din’s asleep, shirtless and rumpled in Luke’s sheets, dark hair a mess against the pillows from how Luke tugged at it earlier, Luke slips over to the pile of his armor and takes a picture of his pauldron.

In the morning, when he slides his tablet to Tionne, she gives him a knowing look and says, “You better keep this secret, or Kyp is going to win the pool.”

Luke, who prefers to think that his padawans have not been betting on his love life, crosses his heart solemnly. “I promise, if you do a good job with this, you’ll win the bet.”

She does a perfect job.

***

Leia’s the first one to see it, mostly because Tionne has forbidden Luke to put a shirt on for at least three hours, and he’s taken to hiding in the comms room. “Is that a mudhorn?” she demands, leaning forward to squint at him.

“Yeah,” Luke says. “It’s a family crest, actually.”

Leia pins him with a stare. “What family would that be?”

Luke scratches the back of his neck, blushing. “You should probably take my name out of the Senate marriage draft,” he says, instead of a direct answer. “I think I’m about to marry the king of Mandalore.”

When Leia’s done yelling and Luke’s done swearing her to secrecy on the subject, she sighs and says, “Well, at least this makes my marriage to Han look a lot better. At least we’re not ancient, mortal enemies.”

Her gaze turns soft, looking at him. “Are you happy?” she asks. “Just promise me you’re happy, Luke.”

“Yeah,” Luke says, not bothering to hide his smile. “Yeah, Leia, I’m really happy.”

***

Luke, because he’s never had an overabundance of patience no matter what he preaches to his students, takes his shirt off at the same time that Din takes his helmet off.

Din freezes with his helmet in his hands, staring at the mudhorn crest on Luke’s chest. His eyes move from the tattoo to Luke’s eyes, and something in his expression is guarded, like he’s protecting himself against some flood of emotion.

It takes all the wind out of Luke’s sails, and for a second he wonders — did he misjudge the situation? is he being too forward? does Din want this as much as he does?

But he’s already come this far, so he swallows, his heartbeat thundering in the quiet of their room, and says, “Din. Marry me. Will you marry me?”

And that didn’t come out right, it was too clumsy, but it doesn’t matter.

 _“Luke,_ ” Din says, like every other word has been erased from his mind. “You — yes. _Yes._ ”

Tangled together in bed, sweaty, sated, the skin around Luke’s tattoo swollen with love bites, Din murmurs the words into the close secret space between their face, and Luke murmurs them back: _Mhi solus tome, mhi solus dar’tome, mhi me’dinui an, mhi ba’juri verde._ He probably butchers the pronunciation, but there’s no one here to hear except Din, who doesn’t seem to care — who bites into his mouth before he’s even finished the last word.


End file.
